Coaching Adults

Richard Marklow is an experienced coach of club standard adult players. In this interview Richard discusses key issues & advice from his many years experience.

A lot of coaches work with club and competition standard adult players.

The approach to working with such players is very different to the way you might work with children. Adults come with more life experience, that many come with habits that have been developed over many years, and some with physical and psychological limitations.

In this live interview with Richard Marklow, a Founder and Director of inspire2coach, and a very experienced coach of club standard adult players, we discussed some of the main issues that come with coaching adults. We shared advice and experience shaped by our many years and thousands of hours coaching adults in our programmes.

6 Golden nuggets for coaches

These notes are summarised from the interview and in [brackets] you'll find the time stamp of where to find the section in the audio. 

[1:46] One of the reasons Rich really enjoys coaching adults is that he knows they've chosen to be there. Whenever you're working with a junior you never quite know if they've chosen to be there - but with an adult you know they've chosen to be there. Adults have so many choices about what they can do with their time. They've chosen to do the sport of tennis over all the other things they can do with their time and that's really nice for a coach.

[2:16] When you're coaching adults it's "true coaching"; you've got to look at the person in front of you and work with the person in front of you. There isn't a technical road map that you can follow the way there is for kids. 

[5:30] Adults are not in a learning environment all of the time - they're not used to it - so they can be slower at picking things up. You have to be patient and explain it carefully. 

Also kids are playing competitions but adults aren't always competing. So, you need to be diligent in asking yourself if you're doing the right things to help the adult improve because you haven't got competition results as a benchmark that you can judge their improvement against. 

[10:24] Sometimes adults want to be improving too quickly. You've got to sell the longer, slower journey to them! Definitely use lower compression balls with beginner or improver adult players to get them confident with rallying. Lower compression balls can help you to get players rallying quicker which makes the game more fun to play. 

[15:50] The most important thing is that the adult can play tennis. We all come to tennis because we want to play and we love tennis because of the game - not the because of the grip on the forehand. You have to be very careful that you don't teach adults so technically, or too early, so that you spoil the player's enjoyment. If someone can hold the racket and it's not too extreme on the backhand and forehand, I'd tend not to change grips too massively, too early. I'm not for one minute saying that grip is not important, but I'd concentrate on other things and change the grip slowly over time. 

[40:15] Audience questions

[42:00] We're in the business of people - we can be confronted with a player in a session who is un-cooperative - whether that's a child or an adult. If you feel that an adult player is affecting your business then you have to have a quiet word at the end of the session to explain your concerns. You can't risk losing four other players because of one customer's behaviour so you have to action that pretty quickly.